Google didn’t develop all of its products it offers on its own. Oftentimes they’ve bought companies or services, changed and/or re-branded them and made them a part of its snowballing empire of awesomeness. Just to see for yourself, go to Google’s What do you love? page. Type anything, let’s just say “llama”, you’ll get a page of eighteen (if I counted right) Google items that use the word “llama” in some way ranging from patents to blogs and everything in between.
During Google’s growth, some of its products become overlapped, obsolete, or unnecessary. In their effort to become more efficient, Google has decided to can some services and consolidate others. Services getting the pink slip include +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools, AdSense for Feeds, Classic Plus, Spreadsheet Gadgets, and Places for Android. Consolidation per the Google Blog are as follows:
Google storage in Picasa and Drive will be consolidated over the next few months, so users will have five GB of free storage across both services. If you’re paying for storage, your free storage will now be counted towards your total. So if you buy a 100GB plan, it will give you 100GB of total storage instead of adding to what you already had. We believe this approach will make it much easier for users. For both free and paid storage, people at or near their current storage limits will have the same amount of storage after this change.
And
We’ve merged Insights for Search into a revamped Google Trends. You can now see search trends and compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties in a single place:google.com/trends. We will no longer support Trends for Websites, which allowed people to compare traffic to and audiences of different websites.
Source: Â Google Blog via Engadget
